Moderators

Session Notes

Dean O'Donnell's Notes

This was a talk that Matt Weise and Geoff Long are prepping for Austin GDC, basically pointing out that licensed games only recreate a small subset of the activities portrayed in their source material, and that the barrier to using more is no longer technical, it's a lack of imagination. Unfortunately, when they asked me to name the last movie I had seen, I replied (truthfully!), "Shooter." It was not the best illustration of their point, but we moved on to Rudeboy, Almost Famous, and Death Note. They used conversions of James Bond properties to shooters as a good example, and then went one step further to point out a weird verb in the Bond lexicon — "Use super senses." This is when Bond shoots exactly the right thing to cause a chain reaction that saves his bacon. In one of the Bond games, they translated this as "Bond sight" where bond can see targets that will cause unexpected things to happen and create "Bond moments." I'd like to see them extend this and not just handwave that verbs like seduce, investigate, and grow up are possible, but show us how they've already been done in other games. That would pretty much prove their thesis.